Effective social network collaboration in complex networked environments may be challenging. Collaboration may include communication across hierarchical levels of an organization as well as across organizational boundaries. However, the amount of communications produced by even a single organization may be intractable for an individual or even a team to manage. The problem may be exacerbated when individuals from multiple organizations collaborate. Thus, communications may be filtered in order for the communications to support effective collaborations.
Effective collaboration may also depend upon a limited circle of contributors that are able to access and produce shared content. Some members of a collaboration circle may be part of the same organization. However, generally, collaboration circles may span multiple organizations and/or different hierarchy levels.
Organizations typically rely upon stand-alone (i.e., siloed) networks to support collaboration of their members. However, stand-alone networks intrinsically limit communication. In practice, to work around this limitation, only some collaboration occurs in these stand-alone systems. Instead, much of the communication occurs through other mediums such as emails, phone calls, and other messaging platforms. The value of the collaboration that takes place in this ad-hoc fashion may be vastly diminished, because the artifacts of the collaboration may not be coherent, archived, or searchable. Furthermore, access to this content may not be easily managed by the collaborating organizations.
There is a need for systems capable of managing content access and sharing across organizations, while still protecting the content from unauthorized access. There is also a need for systems capable of providing searchable content and ongoing collaboration artifacts to the appropriate individuals in a collaboration circle.